If you’re reading this, you’ve either got access to the internet or a trusty friend who’s printing it out for you every week. Assuming it’s the former, you’ll probably have seen something to do with the Super Bowl – perhaps even one of the halftime ads. Figures from the day after the event say that YouTube was the top place for online views of the ads, 126m to Facebook’s 61m, but that Facebook saw the most shares: 70% of all those online. Here’s a picture from the Budweiser ad, obviously included because of the dog.

Facebook Celebrity Mentions app gets an update

Facebooks latest update to roll out on Thursday will make the interactions between public figures and fans easier. The Mentions App will allow celebrities such as actors, musicians and athletes to track the general opinion of them via social media. Will an increase of fan interactions be an asset to public figures or a nightmare?

Tim Tam launches two new flavours for Valentine’s Day

To celebrate Valentines Day, Tim Tams has once again teamed up with Adriano Zumbo. The two new flavours are a coconut cream variety and choc raspberry. The collaboration is a way to innovative within an established brand, Brand manager Chloe Green stating ‘ We’re always looking for ways to delight our fans”. The Patissier’s new flavours will join the existing Adriano Zumbo Range.

Twitter’s revenue is better than expected for Q4

Twitter announced mixed results from its Q4 report. The network now hosts 288 million monthly active users, an increase of just 4 million for the quarter, well below the 291 million predicted. However, its revenue was up 97% year-on-year to $479m, compared to an expected $453m. Ad revenue reached $432m, of which 88% came from mobile. The Guardian published a piece about what we can glean from the report, stating that growth may have been hampered by technical issues with Apple’s iOS8 launch. The British newspaper discusses Twitter’s 2015 plans, including a focus on recommendation/curation, the growth of mobile video and big plans for the Cricket World Cup.

Expect tweets to appear in Google searches

Google and Twitter have struck a deal that allows the former access to the latter’s stream of data, which will make tweets more visible in search results. There’s no ad revenue involved – rather, the move is looking for a mutual benefit as tweets become more searchable and searches more useful.

Instant Timeline for new Twitter users revealed

Twitter is testing its ‘Instant Timeline’ feature, which it hopes will solve some of the problems encountered by new users. When you set up an account, it will scan your contacts (provided you grant permission) and analyse who they are/who they follow, then begin showing tweets that it thinks will be of interest to you. Vindu Goel tested the feature for the New York Times, describing the algorithm as “eerily accurate” at divining his interests. As you can see, it doesn’t look wildly different from Twitter as we know it.

Twitter wants to earn ad revenue from small and medium businesses, so it’s making it easier to buy promoted tweets. Now, users can simply log in to the Analytics dashboard, select a tweet and budget and watch the magic happen.

Instagram tweaks videos to auto-loop

Instagram videos will now automatically replay in users’ streams, much like Vines. You can change settings so that it only happens on WiFi, but can’t turn off the feature altogether. Not that you’d want to, of course.

LinkedIn shows strong growth in ad revenue

LinkedIn ad revenue in Q4 grew to $153m, up 56% from the previous year, and accounting for 24% of total revenue. During 2014, ads raised $454.5m for the company, up 46% from 2013. If you prefer your numbers columned, here’s all that again in graph form:

The Gap produces Instagram campaign but gets kicked off Tinder

The Gap is getting all romantic this Spring. First of all, it’s launched a series of Instagram videos, designed for the new looping feature, under the hashtag #SpringIsWeird. They feature influencers Jenny Slate and Paul Dano, and will track “the burgeoning romance between [the two], as they navigate chance encounters, first dates and moody spring weather in the hope of finding their perfect fit.” Their perfect fit! Very good, clothes brand.

As if that wasn’t enough, the high street retailer is now on Tinder! Or it was, until its campaign got pulled for violating the terms of service. Not sure if that’s better or worse than my own Tinder record.

Coca Cola asked Twitter users to tag negative tweets with #MakeItHappy, in order to have them made into cute figures using ASCII code. Lovely, right? Well, provided nobody tags a quote from Mein Kampf. And the campaign isn’t automated. And… oh dear.

#AustraliaDay your way

National Museum of Australia & National Australia Day Council teamed up with Twitter to make history by creating a digital snapshot of how the world spent Australia Day. Throughout the 26th & 27th, #AustraliaDay tweets were curated in a live feed on the Australia Day Your Way website. From there highlights will be collected and stored in a Twitter time capsule, and featured on display at the Museum. Social participation was up 50% from last year with over 105k tweets contributed to the capsule from celebrations all over the world.

WeChat is testing ads

WeChat has started testing ads in ‘Moments’, its (rough) equivalent to Facebook’s News Feed. So far, the network has been reluctant to include advertising; with 468.1 million monthly active users, this could be big business. Sponsored posts will be marked ‘promoted’.

WhatsApp for web browsers

Want to chat to your mates at work, but can’t get away with using your phone? No, no, me neither. Anyway, say that you did, you can now access WhatsApp through a web client. Just scan a QR code using your phone and you use the messaging app on your computer.

The service works for Android, BlackBerry, Nokia S60 and Windows mobile app users and you’ll have to use Chrome as your browser. WeChat was quick to remind people that it already has a web-based service, which is iOS-friendly.

Twitter has added a translation service, powered by Bing. Users can now click on a globe icon, which appears in tweets in a foreign language, to have the tweet translated. The new version will appear just below the original text.

Snapchat to launch ‘Discover’

Snapchat is set to release its ‘Discover’ feature at the end of the month. When it does, it’ll be staking its claim as a publisher, posting its own media and that of other companies, including ESPN, CNN and Vice.

Tumblr introduces Creatrs Network

Tumblr has revealed its ‘Creatrs Network’, with which it hopes to connect Tumblr bloggers with brands that want to use their content in ads and marketing. David Hayes, Tumblr’s head of creative strategy, said:

We think the creative class is really the next generation that’s going to come up and change the world and we think we have the largest creative class of any platform.

Bloggers of the world, unite.

Pinterest’s search results hope to appeal to men

Pinterest is introducing new search filters, aimed at making the network more popular with men. Now, search results will change depending on the gender you selected when signing up. According to the company, men are searching for apparel, technology, travel, gardening, recipes, gadgets, design, luxury cars, tattoos, and, errrrr, camping.

Pinterest buys Kosei

Pinterest advertising is in for a big year. Shortly after releasing its first Promoted Pins, the platform has purchased Kosei, an ad tech firm that specialises in targeting ads based on ‘relationship and recommendation modelling’.

Transfer money via Twitter

Indian bank, ICICI, has launched a ‘tweet to pay’ function. Users simply need to follow @icicibank and send a DM containing the recipient’s username and amount to be transferred. The recipient doesn’t need to be an ICICI customer, either. On a completely unrelated note, my Twitter handle is @nickmulligan.

Nissan has teamed up with YouTube stars, including Roman Atwood (below) and Epic Meal Time, to create a set of Super Bowl teaser videos. Under the hashtag #withdad, they focus on ways to get the work/family balance right. Like turning your house into a GIANT BALL PIT.

Welcome to our weekly super bowl of the top plays in social media, racking up the yards in activations, engagement and statistics from all over the web.

So get practising your end zone dance, because here comes the touchdown pass – the Top 10 stories in social media this week;

1. Companies boosting digital marketing budgets
According to Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2012 Report, companies are looking to boost budgets for their 2012 digital marketing strategies. The growth is fairly significant with 68% are increasing their digital budgets in 2012 compared to compared to 45% of companies increasing overall marketing budgets.

2. Corporate blogging declines as newer tools rule
A study on the usage of social media in Inc. 500 corporations shows fewer of them are using blogging, message/bulletin boards, online video, podcasting and MySpace and more are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Foursquare.

The platform most utilized by the Inc. 500 is Facebook, with 74% of companies using it. Virtually tied at 73% is the adoption of the professional network, LinkedIn.

The use of corporate blogs dropped to 37% from 50% in 2010, as this mature tool evolves into other forms or is replaced by communication through Facebook or Twitter.

Social media tools are seen as important for company goals. Ninety percent of responding executives report that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation.

Eighty-eight percent see these tools as important for generating web traffic while 81% find them important for lead generation. Seventy-three percent say that social media tools are important for customer support programs.

3. India is Now Facebook’s No. 2 Nation Behind the U.S.
India moved from sixth to second place on the global leaderboard for total number of Facebook users in January, though the world’s second most populated country has still got a considerable way to go to overthrow the world’s largest Facebook nation; the US.

Colombia was measured as having the fastest user growth on Facebook and Brazil and Indonesia, alongside India, were marked as countries to watch.

Looking to Europe, in one month alone Germany and Poland grew a respective 500k and 300k users and they’ve got even more room to grow. Japan have also had strong growth this month.

5. Facebook ‘likely to roll out mobile ads in weeks’
Given recent IPO filing admitting it was weak on mobile advertising, its unsurprising that its plan is to bring out mobile ads within the next couple of weeks in order to generate advertising revenues.

January 2012 saw featured stories within users’ news feeds for the first time so it makes sense that mobile ads would be the next logical step forward.

In December it claimed to have 425 million monthly active users using its mobile products, which is around half of its total monthly active users, and 21% growth from September’s 300 million figure.

The Next Web highlighted the interesting takeaways from the report – namely, how different countries use Twitter:

In the period from September 1st to November 30th, 30% of Japanese accounts posted at least once, while in Brazil the number slipped to 25%.

For both countries, the number is surprisingly low, meaning that at least 70% of those millions of accounts were dormant for at least 3 months, if not more.

The country with the highest percentage of active accounts is the Netherlands, with 33% of the accounts posting in the 3 month period.

The most active countries on Twitter include Spain, the US and Indonesia.

8. Google+ passes 100 million users
Paul Allen has been doing his usual research into Google+ user figures, and according to him, the site has grown by more than 10% between January 19th and February 1st, passing 100 million users.

If these growth rates continues, marketers will be unable to ignore Google+.

10. Superbowl hits record for Tweets per second
Last night’s Superbowl broke a record for the most Tweets per second (TPS) for a sporting event. According to Twitter, the average TPS was 10,000, with the peak hit at 12,333 TPS.

The way records like these keep on falling, we can only speculate what, say, the 2014 World Cup final will be like.